The present invention relates to a system for designing a network and more particularly to a system for designing an intercommunication network among a plurality of devices by the use of revisable rules and data.
Design of network systems such as wire cables used for power or signals, plumbing fixtures and pipes, heating, ventilation and air conditioning duct work, aircraft mechanical cabling, pneumatic tubes and the like heretofore generally has been manual. For the purpose of brevity the word cable is used hereinbelow to represent all such elements appropriate to varied environments, such as, but not limited to, wire for electrical systems, pipes for plumbing systems and tubes for pneumatic systems and the like. Wire, pipe or tube lengths, for example, are conventionally determined or estimated by various methods including measuring string on a mock-up scale or life-sized physical model of a product or building or by digitizing engineering drawings.
Resulting computer generated or manually generated engineering drawings are symbolic, which is a disadvantage when designing a network. Such symbolic manufacturing drawings are usually not geometrically accurate nor are the dimensions accurate. The final engineering drawing, while generally to standards, is symbolic, so the drawing does not resemble a cable.
Cable routing drawings suffer from another disadvantage: conventionally they are more descriptive than pictorial. When cables require sequential assembly, computer aided models are so complex as to be almost invariably incomplete even after several revisions. Their level of complexity and degree of completeness are inversely related to the ease by which assemblers or installers can decipher the drawings that describe the network. The only task not manually performed has been the process of drafting engineering drawings, which task is often accomplished by a computer aided design system. Even here, administrative data as well as geometric data needed for drafting is usually accumulated manually.
Network and especially cable design has traditionally involved less than accurate methods. Requests to have cables designed were often incomplete. This was due to the communications medium between the cable designer, who belongs to a first class of user, and people requesting cables, who belong to a second class of user, being inaccurate, hand written notes.
In a manual system of designing, when a number of designers provide information over the course of the project, the data that is actually entered can bear less than strict resemblance to that which was intended. That is, the information that is transferred from one designer to another or from one designer to an anthologizer may be distorted, missing or otherwise incomplete. One step toward solving this problem has been described in the article "Think Large Scale CAD/CAM With Telecommunications" by B. Forgue, Mesures, Vol. 52, No. 2, 23 February 1987, pp. 33-34. This article discloses a network that conveys data between a central office and 12 regional offices for the manufacturer of corrugated cardboard cartons. A graphics database is continuously updated by 60 designers. Three dimensional packages are designed around the product to be contained and corresponding flattened shapes and sizes are formed by folding and unfolding on a CRT display. All 60 designers in the system are considered to be in the same class and each of them is responsible for describing the corrugated box being designed. In the aforementioned system, the design requirements are relatively rudimentary so there is no need for another class of individuals to provide information to the system in order to guarantee completeness thereof.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,422,158 issued to Galie discloses a digital data processing system and a query composed of entries to locate items that are stored in a multiple layer data base. The entries have one or more event types and the database includes items that have either an exact or inexact match with entries of the query. The query and a first one of the database layers are processed to form packages having an assigned order. The packages contain representations of the event types in a second layer of the database and representations of the degree of match between the entry in the first layer and an entry of the query. As a result, the representations of the furthest degree of match represent the degree of match of the query to both the first and second layers of the database. Only one class of users can use the aforementioned system at a time. Accordingly, no provision is made for a second class of users to interact with the first class to complete technical descriptions of the items in the database.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,648,044 issued to Hardy et al describes a tool for building a knowledge system and running a consultation on a computer. The knowledge system includes a knowledge base having English-like language expressing facts, rules and meta-facts for specifying how rules are to be applied to solve a specific problem. The tool includes interactive knowledge base debugging, question generation, legal response checking, explanation, certainty factors and the use of variables. A knowledge engineer in the aforementioned system creates the entire expert system prior to its use. A consultation user represents a single class of user and does not interact with the knowledge engineer. Thus, the consultation user himself is responsible for providing enough information to obtain a complete answer to his own queries.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,658,370 issued to Erman et al discloses a tool for knowledge engineers for building and interpreting a knowledge base having separate portions. Portions include encoding control knowledge, factual knowledge and judgmental rules. The tool has an inference engine applying the judgmental rules according to a built-in control procedure defining discrete states or control steps during a consultation with the user. The tool can be used to build knowledge systems that can explain their conclusions and reasoning and are intelligible and modifiable. The knowledge engineer may provide control blocks to be executed at the start of the consultation, after the instantiation of specified classes, when a value for a specified attribute is to be determined, after a specified attribute is determined and upon explicit invocation by another control block. Once again, there is only one class of user. A knowledge engineer in the aforementioned system creates the entire expert system prior to its use. A consultation user represents another class of user and does not interact with the knowledge engineer. Thus, the consultation user is responsible for providing enough information to obtain a complete answer to the queries that he himself poses.
Network connections such as cabling are often designed last. This is symptomatic of last minute changes in the design of subassemblies that require cables. The time associated with completing a given product must often be lengthened because network connections cannot keep up with latest design changes.
As a result of the aforementioned factors, cable designing for development projects has usually been inefficient and frequently inaccurate.
It would be advantageous to provide a digital system to allow only a few requestors to create a cable description.
It would further be advantageous to provide a digital system to allow only a few cable designers to design a network of completed cable descriptions.
It would also be advantageous for the invention, once developed, to be practiced by any person using similar hardware.
Moreover, it would be advantageous to allow two classes of users to supply complete cable descriptions.